Temple Sholom Sisterhood Choir under the direction of Joyce Cherry with pianist Kathy Bjorseth performed an afternoon concert of Jewish music at the Weinberg Residence on Jan. 13. Featured were three works by Joan Beckow, a resident of the Louis Brier Hospital and a Temple Sholom member. Beckow was an active composer and music director in Los Angeles and, for a time, was Carol Burnett’s music director. The 23-voice Sisterhood Choir has sung for the annual Sisterhood Service for a number of years, but the recent concert at the Weinberg was a first for them outside of Temple Sholom.
Some of the artists on opening night of the group show Community Longing and Belonging, Jan. 15 at the Zack Gallery. The exhibit marked Jewish Disability Awareness and Inclusion Month and ran until Jan. 27.
Eurovision 2018 winner Netta Barzilai, right, performed at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver on Jan. 26 to help celebrate the 18th anniversary of Birthright Israel. Here, she is pictured with Carmel Tanaka, emcee of the night with IQ 2000 Trivia. The dance party was presented by the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver in partnership with Axis Vancouver, Hillel BC and the JCCGV.
“Open Doors” by Marcie Levitt-Cooper.
(photo by Daniel Wajsman)
The group show Community Longing and Belonging,
which opened Jan. 15 at the Zack Gallery, marks Jewish Disability Awareness and
Inclusion Month (JDAIM).
“I heard about community art shows in
celebration of JDAIM in other communities,” said Leamore Cohen, inclusion
services coordinator at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver, who
was the driving force behind the local exhibit.
“I thought an unjuried exhibit would be a
fabulous way to honour our community-wide commitment to remove barriers, to
celebrate our community members’ creative capacities,” she said.
The main idea was to open up participation to
everyone – professional artists and amateurs, people of different skill levels,
abilities, perspectives, faiths and socioeconomic status.
“To make participation truly inclusive,” said
Cohen, “we provided each artist with a 12-by-16 wood panel. We have also been
taking direction from Kickstart Disability Arts and Culture and its artistic
director, Yuri Arajs, as we wanted to ensure that this event is fully
accessible.”
The JDAIM inclusion initiative and month of
advocacy began throughout North America in 2009, explained Cohen. The idea for
the art exhibit started to take form last spring, when Cohen approached Zack
Gallery director Linda Lando.
“Linda was really receptive to the idea of the
show.… Once I had the green light from her, the support and use of the
gallery,” said Cohen, “I began to focus more on the theme.”
The theme of community and inclusion prompted
her next steps. She reached out to many different organizations and communities
and invited artists from all over the Lower Mainland to participate. The call
for submissions went out in late September, and the response was remarkable.
Fifty-two artists are included in the show.
“We have artists from Vancouver, Burnaby,
Richmond, North Vancouver, and even as far out as Cloverdale,” said Cohen.
“I’ve had the good fortune to meet all these new and amazingly creative people,
welcome them to our community centre, and make new friends along the way. It’s
been a joy. It broke my heart that I had to turn many away because of the
limited space in the gallery. I have artists who want to sign up for the next
year. There is so much excitement and so much more to say on this issue.”
To frame this exhibit, Cohen posed two
questions, which are being used in its promotional materials: “How do we make
meaning of the concept of community, the real and the imagined spaces we
inhabit? What does community longing look like and what are the possibilities
for belonging in an ever-changing world?”
“This show was a challenge and an invitation to
look at social problems creatively and critically,” Cohen told the Independent.
“It was also an opportunity for artists living with diverse needs to exhibit
their work in a professional venue and to receive exposure.
“I don’t think we are going to resolve the
problems of longing and belonging, or longing for belonging, any time soon. I
think we’ll always have people who are better situated and people whose social
networks are more tenuous. We should just keep having the conversations and
build up those connections. We create new platforms and new access points, new
opportunities for people to engage and tell their stories, whatever they look
like and from whatever lens, whether it be through mental health, sexual
identity, ability or socioeconomic status. We all have a story to tell.”
Cohen shared one example of how the show’s
theme relates to her own life.
“The ‘longing’ part of the theme resonates with
a lot of people,” she said. “It resonates with me as well. It emerges from my
own story of disconnection from the Jewish community during my youth and young
adulthood. Fortunately, so, too, does the ‘belonging’ part of this show. The
JCC is a wonderful place, a place for belonging.”
The theme allowed for a number of different
approaches, and the skill of the various participating artists varies widely,
but the utter diversity becomes its main attraction. Although the size and
shape of the canvases – the wooden boards provided by the organizers – are
universal, the content is anything but, and so is the media. Some pieces are
oils, others acrylic; still others, mixed media. There are abstracts and
figurative compositions. Some have narratives. Others evoke emotions. Some have
Jewish connotations. Others don’t. Some artists participated solo, while others
enrolled as a family group.
Marcie Levitt-Cooper represents one such
family. Her painting “Open Doors” depicts a colony of colourful birdhouses.
Every door of every birdhouse is open, creating a welcoming avian village, a
festive metaphor that makes you smile. No birds appear in the image, but you
can almost hear them sing. The artist’s three daughters – Rebecca Wosk, Teddie
Wosk and Margaux Wosk – also exhibit in the show.
Another family of artists is mother Elizabeth
Snigurowicz and son Matthew Tom Wing. “They regularly come to the Jewish
Community Centre inclusion services Art Hive drop-in program, a low-barrier,
free art program,” said Cohen.
Daniel Malenica doesn’t have a family in the
show, but her charming, pastel-toned piece is a jubilation of the artist’s
Croatian roots and her LGBTQ+ community. Two girls embrace each other in the
painting, both wear Slavic costumes. The title, “Veselye u Selu,” is the
English phonetic spelling of a phrase in the artist’s mother tongue, meaning
“Celebration at the Village.”
In Evelyn Fichmann’s painting “Embrace,” the
artist, a recent immigrant from Brazil, has incorporated words in English and
Hebrew. “Encourage,” “include,” “educate,” “respect,” “engage” and “support”
surround the image, all fitting descriptors of what we should strive to do in
our communities.
Community Longing and Belonging runs until Jan
27.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Olga Campbell (seated) takes a break from signing books at the opening of her exhibit A Whisper Across Time, which also served as a launch of her book by the same name. (photo by Gordon E. McCaw)
The impacts of the Holocaust continue to reverberate. Even though most of the first-generation survivors have passed away, the next generations, the survivors’ children and grandchildren, remember.
Local artist Olga Campbell belongs to the second generation. Her parents survived the Holocaust, but her mother’s entire family was murdered by the Nazis. The need to give those family members a voice was Campbell’s driving force in writing her new book, A Whisper Across Time: My Family’s Story of the Holocaust Told Through Art and Poetry. Her solo exhibit with the same name, co-presented with the Cherie Smith JCC Jewish Book Festival, opened at the Zack Gallery on Nov. 15. The night also served as a book launch.
“The art in this show are mostly prints from the book,” she said in an interview with the Independent. “There are also some pieces that are offshoots on the same theme, even though they aren’t in the book.”
Campbell has always known that her mother’s family didn’t survive the war, but the emotional impact of their deaths built slowly over the years. It took decades for this book to emerge.
“In 1997,” she said, “I heard a program on the radio about the second-generation survivors. Their words about the trauma being passed between generations resonated with me.”
She embarked on an artistic journey, and she is still following a path of exploration. Her art reflects her emotional upheaval. Her paintings and statues are fragmented, with broken lines and distorted figures, evoking feelings of loss and anguish. One look at her paintings and a disquiet tension washes over the viewer. It is apparent that a huge tragedy inspired her work.
In 2005, Campbell had a show at the Zack, called Whispers Across Time. “Even then,” she said, “I knew I had to write about my family. The art show was not enough. I had to say more, but, at that time, I couldn’t. I was too raw, too emotional. But my family kept tugging at me. I needed to tell their story. I was compelled to write this book.”
Unfortunately, she knew only the bare bones of her mother’s life. So she plunged into a deep and long research period, surfed the internet, contacted Yad Vashem and other sources. After several years, the book crystallized.
“My book is a tribute to my family, the family I never knew,” she said.
“Of course, it is only one family of the millions of families killed during the Holocaust.”
Campbell spoke of the relevance of her book in today’s political climate. “Our world is a chaotic place right now, somewhat reminiscent of the period before the war,” she said. “There are over 68 million people around the world that are refugees or displaced. My book is not only about my family. It is a cautionary tale. It is about intergenerational trauma and its repercussions across time.”
She created new art for the book, wrote poetry to supplement the imagery, and also included an essay on her family members and their lives, destroyed by the war. The paintings in the book and on the gallery walls are powerful but melancholy, even distressing.
“My work always had this darkness, the sadness, but also a bit of hope,” she said. “I never know what will happen when I start a piece. I’m very intuitive. I would throw some paint on an empty canvas and let my emotions and the art itself guide me through the process. I use photos in my works and digital collages. My finished pieces always surprise me.”
When the book was ready, Campbell applied for another show at the Zack, to coincide with the book launch.
“I wanted to give it the same name as the previous show, Whispers Across Time,” she said, “but I checked the internet, and there are a couple other books already published with the same title. I decided to change it.” The book and the show are called A Whisper Across Time. “I feel a lot lighter now, after the book is finished and published,” she said.
A Whisper Across Time is Campbell’s second publication. In 2009, she published Graffiti Alphabet. She has been doing art for more than 30 years, but that is not how she started her professional career. She was a social worker until, in 1986, she took her first art class. That year changed her life.
“It was such fun. I loved it,” she said. “I went back to work afterwards but it didn’t feel as much fun. I decided to get an art education. I enrolled in Emily Carr when I was 44.”
Campbell finished the art program, continued working part-time as a social worker, and dedicated the rest of her time to painting, sculpture and photography.
“I’ve been a member of the Eastside Culture Crawl for 22 years, since its beginning,” she said. “I participated in the Artists in Our Midst for many years, too. At first, when people asked me, I would say I do art. Now, I say, I’m an artist. I must be. That’s what I do. I’m retired now, but I did art when I was working, too, and it was always very healing and rewarding – still is…. If, for some reason, I don’t paint for awhile, I feel as if something is missing.”
The A Whisper Across Time exhibit continues until Dec. 9. For more about her work and books, visit olgacampbell.com.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Claudie Azoulai, left, and Nicole Schouela. Their work comprises the exhibit Heart to Heart, which is at the Zack Gallery until Nov. 9. (photo from the artists)
The latest show at the Zack Gallery, Heart to Heart, presents the work of two artists in two vastly different media. Claudie Azoulai makes felt tapestries, while Nicole Schouela specializes in photography. Despite the differences in material representation, however, the colour palettes and the themes are amazingly similar – places close to their heart, places that invoke love and peace. The places and the emotions they inspire consolidate the show into a seamless, cohesive whole.
“We wanted to have a shared show forever,” Azoulai told the Independent. “We’re cousins, Nicole and I. We grew up together.”
They came up with the idea of a joint show about a year ago. “The timing is perfect,” said Azoulai. “It takes me, on average, about a month to create one piece, and there are 13 pieces of mine in this show, all new.”
All of these pieces are related to a children’s book Azoulai has written. “The book will be called The Spring Feast. It’s about the flora and fauna of Hornby Island, one of my favourite places. I will photograph every tapestry here, and they will be the illustrations for the book,” she said.
Azoulai considers herself a part of the great pageantry of life, and Hornby Island provides her with the opportunity to experience it firsthand. One of the tapestries, “Herring Run,” reflects her connection with nature.
“Every spring, herring come to Hornby Island to spawn,” she explained. “Then salmon come to eat the herring. Seals come to eat the salmon. Whales come to eat seals. Eagles fly over to eat the roe. Everything is alive, this great circle of life, and I’m part of it, too. When I come to Hornby Island in spring, I try to stay outside all day.”
Many of the tapestries depict various birds of Hornby Island. “I work from my imagination,” Azoulai said, “but when I need a particular pose or gesture, I go to the beach to watch the birds or look at photographs.”
Azoulai dyes her wool herself, and no batch comes out of the vat exactly the same, even if all the ingredients of the dye match. “Colours of the fleece always surprise me,” she said. “They influence the images. When I’m stuck, I would dye a new batch, and the new colours might affect the image, lead to a change. The colours dictate the picture more often than not.”
She frequently experiments with new materials, incorporating silk or synthetic particles into the base of wool to add a shine or a different texture. “As long as the fleece entangles the other threads, the image stays together,” she said about that technique.
Mixing and matching is also Schouela’s preferred technique, using Photoshop to work with different parts from a multitude of photographs.
“I have nine pieces in this show,” she said. “They are places I revisit often, not by traveling far away, but the places where I live and work. The places I walk. The places I love. The places that have almost a ritualistic meaning for me.… Sometimes, they are physical places. Other times, they are mental places.”
Schouela started her artistic life as a dancer, but dance is an unforgiving art form that takes its toll on the body. She switched first to ceramics, and later dedicated herself to photography. In everything she creates – a dance or a vase or a photo collage – there is movement and transformation. The images flow through each other, striving towards abstraction and emotional truth.
“Photo manipulation is freeing,” she said. “I could take pieces from here and there and create a new image I want, while it still retains the essence of the originals. It might take me several months to finish one picture. I would stop working with it and then, later, I would return to it again and again, until I’m satisfied.”
She photographs places that are part of her and her search for connections and understanding. By now, she has thousands of photos in her digital archives. “Sometimes, I would use a photograph or a fragment of one years after it was taken, because it would fit one particular composition or a feeling I want to explore,” she said. “I don’t want my images to resemble the real places. The original photographs are not important by themselves. They are part of the process. Sometimes, I play with pieces of 30 to 50 photos for one picture. It is fun.”
Schouela’s abstract compositions on the gallery walls lean towards pastel or black and white, with occasional splashes of bright colour. Some are geometrical. Others tell a story or convey an emotion.
“Traditional photography doesn’t interest me anymore – anyone can take a picture now with their phones,” she said. “I don’t want my imagery to be like paintings either. Photography is a separate art form. If I wanted a painting, I would paint. No, I want my collages to keep their photographic elements obvious.”
The exhibit Heart to Heart opened on Oct. 11 and continues until Nov. 9. To learn more about the artists, check out their websites: claudieazoulai.com and nicoleschouela.com.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Barbara Heller’s exhibit, Divine Sparks, is at the Zack Gallery until Oct. 8. (photo by Olga Livshin)
Barbara Heller’s new solo show at the Zack Gallery, Divine Sparks, could be divided into three distinct themes, each one representative of a world culture: the Sephirot, the Mudras and the Future Reliquaries. Each of the three resonates with one of three religions, Judaism, Hinduism and Christianity, respectively, but Heller, a master weaver, sees divine sparks everywhere. Her tapestries, big and small, invite gallery guests to contemplate what unites us, no matter our ethnicity or religious affiliation.
Symbolism infuses Heller’s images, starting with the centrepiece of the show, “Tzimtzum,” or “Transcendence.” The large tapestry is a stylized ladder. The midnight blue rungs at the bottom coalesce into a dead bird, but the higher your eyes travel, the lighter the colours become. Two pairs of wings punctuate the climb of colours from dark indigo to white radiance.
“The ladder has many interpretations,” Heller told the Independent. “It can be a metaphor for our life, a liminal space between birth and death…. For me, the rungs are stepping stones on the path of spiritual attainment, of transcendence.”
Heller has shown this tapestry at several exhibitions already, to great acclaim. Recently, it won the American Tapestry Alliance Award.
“Originally, I wanted to display this tapestry with real feathers piled along the bottom,” the artist said about “Tzimtzum.” “I have amassed many beautiful feathers, and friends kept bringing me more, but I discovered it was almost impossible to send real feathers anywhere. I displayed the tapestry in Poland a couple years ago, and they told me that real feathers have to be quarantined for weeks before being allowed into the country. And they can’t be from endangered species. I wasn’t sure about that.”
Since the plan involving the real feathers fell through, Heller made a series of small tapestries of her feather collection, Sephirot, specifically for the Zack show.
“I already had lots of yarn died blue for the ‘Tzimtzum,’” she said. She called the series Sephirot after the kabbalah’s spiritual qualities of understanding, wisdom, love and judgment, among others.
“Some of the feathers are almost photographic,” she said. “In the others, I played with colours and sparkles.”
The second series in the show, Mudras, obtained its name from the hand gestures prevalent in Hinduism, Asian dancing, yoga and meditation.
“Typically, mudras are used as a way to direct energy flow in the body,” Heller said. “According to yoga, different areas of the hand stimulate specific areas of the brain. By applying light finger pressure to these areas of the hand, you can ‘activate’ the corresponding region of the brain. In addition, hand mudras also symbolize various feelings and emotions.”
Heller’s Mudras is a series of small, uniform-sized round images of various hand gestures. The hands are woven of golden yarn and appliquéd to dark-green fabric with a vague “computer motherboard” pattern. Parts of real electronics – wires, chips, connectors – are incorporated into the design of every gesture, as if to emphasize the similarities between computer circuits and the neuron circuitry in our brains.
“I collect old electronics and take them apart, and use them in my weaving,” said Heller. “This series was fun to make.”
The other series, Future Reliquaries, is an older one. Also depicting hands embedded with parts of electronic devices, it reflects humanity’s developing love affair with technology.
Several tapestries of the series are rather large. In each one, a human hand in golden yarn stands out from the background of an ancient traditional pattern. “Different tapestries sport different patterns: from Persia, Indonesia, Turkey, Navajo,” Heller said.
Like in the Mudras series, the interlaced computer piece are symbolic of our interconnection with machines.
Heller wrote: “This series deals with three apparently separate but, in my mind, connected histories: weaving, computing and religion. Weaving is a binary system of up/down, just as computing is a binary system of on/off…. Religion is not only a store of faith; it is a store of history and social values…. Today, we are creating a new religion. We are worshipping the technology.”
Heller’s tapestries contemplate the future status of today’s electronic remnants in the context of ancient fabrics. “As holy relics were housed in reliquaries, often made of gold and gems, I’m trying to populate my tapestries with the future relics – the computer chips and wires.”
Beside the large hands, there is also a selection of tiny ones, where each miniscule woven hand is linked to topics such as keys or clocks, science or beauty, birth or death.
Heller’s exhibit is part of larger happenings in Vancouver this month – a symposium of the Textile Society of America. The symposium takes place Sept. 19-23, and many galleries around the city besides the Zack are displaying textile or weaving exhibitions to coincide with it.
As a well-known local artist, Heller has been one of the event organizers from the beginning. “We have a wealth of local textile artists, and about 400 people are coming to the symposium from all over the world,” she said.
The planning for the symposium began three years ago. “We made sure that the hotel reservations were available on the dates that didn’t include Yom Kippur,” she said. “Unfortunately, a year ago, the hotel informed us that they had to change our reservation dates.”
So, now, the first day of the symposium falls on Yom Kippur, as other reservations were not available, and the society has posted an apology on its website.
The Zack Gallery offers a bus tour of three textile exhibitions in the city on Sept. 20. To learn more about the tour and to register, visit jccgv.com/art-and-culture/gallery. For more about Heller, visit barbaraheller.ca.
Divine Sparks opened on Sept. 6 and continues until Oct. 8.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
The paintings of Frank Levine are on display at the Zack Gallery until Aug. 31 in a shared show, called Celebration, with Melanie Fogell. (photo by Olga Livshin)
The latest show at the Zack Gallery, Celebration, showcases two artists, Melanie Fogell and Frank Levine. At first glance, they don’t seem to have much in common.
Fogell’s art is bright and flamboyant, totally abstract, and her canvases are large, while Levine’s paintings are generally smaller, more intimate, his colours more muted and his compositions tend to have recognizable figurative patterns: people, musical instruments, landscapes, cityscapes.
However, both artists celebrate life through their paintings. For years, both approached art as a hobby – it is only recently that Fogell started painting full-time, while Levine still works as an accountant. Both artists also lived for some time in Gibsons, B.C., where they met a few years ago. Fogell still lives there, while Levine has moved to Richmond.
Levine’s life has involved several drastic moves, geographic and professional. Born in England, he received his art education in London. He majored in fashion design. Upon graduation, he opened his own fashion boutique in London, but that didn’t last long in the cutthroat industry. After that, he worked for 10 years as a clothing designer for a large factory in the city.
“The clothing industry in London is very stressful and loud. Everyone shouts and screams,” he explained in an interview with the Independent. “The designers had to produce a new design every week, two collections a year. If a particular coat sold, the owners congratulated themselves at how good they were at selling. If it didn’t sell, the designers were to blame.”
After a decade of the stress and screaming, Levine switched to accounting, which he considers an occupation much less taxing on his nerves. In 1978, he moved to Canada and settled in Vancouver. “Antisemitism in England was a consideration in my decision to move,” he said.
Wherever he has lived, and whatever his day job, he has kept on painting.
“I have always painted when I had the time,” he said. “I don’t paint every day, only when I’m inspired. Once a week, my son and his children come for a visit, and we paint together.”
One of the paintings in the show, “Prism,” came from one of those weekly sessions. The small image features a blue-and-gold cityscape, happy and bright, vaguely reminiscent of a Greek city. “My son suggested the theme of prism,” said Levine.
Many of the artist’s paintings are landscapes, but he portrays them through a mesh of geometric figures. The lines creating the geometric patterns add mysticism to the trees and lakes. “I’m drawn to the images that have passion, not something everyone would paint,” he said.
Whatever his brush depicts – his backyard in Gibsons with a visiting bear, a small café in the Luxembourg Gardens in Paris or picturesque gates in China – his love for the places shines through the canvas.
Unfortunately, not many people have seen his charming work. “I didn’t do any promotion until recently and I sell maybe two or three paintings a year,” he said. “I only joined Facebook a month ago.”
Over the years, Levine has participated in several exhibitions in Gibsons and has had his paintings displayed at a Richmond community centre. This Zack Gallery show is only the second time in Vancouver that the public has had a chance to admire them, and it is his first exhibit in a Vancouver art gallery.
Unlike Levine, Fogell is well known on the Vancouver art scene. She had a solo show at the Zack in 2011 and another one in 2014. Her early art education at Emily Carr University of Art + Design could have led to a career in the arts, but, like many others, she discovered that it was extremely difficult to make a living as an artist. She became a piano teacher instead.
Years later, Fogell went back to university for a master’s in women’s studies and then did a PhD in educational research. She has taught women’s studies at the University of British Columbia and piano as a private tutor, but, throughout the years, just like Levine, she has never stopped painting. She loved art too much, and the need to express herself through imagery drove her to paint. She paints full-time now.
“I did this group of paintings, the Oval Series, over the last two years,” she said about the work in the Zack Gallery show. “It began by me doodling oval shapes. Then I started thinking of possible meanings of this particular shape. The oval could stand for an egg, which is a symbol of life, a celebration of life. Or it could be a face, the beginning of a face, not ready to be recognized. They could be faces of people in my life or people I have yet to meet.”
Fogell’s paintings burst with primal colours, and her ovals seem like gladness enclosed, surrounding the viewers like a collection of exuberant eggs, or new leaves shimmering in the sunlight, or a field of tulips swaying in a breeze. They promise renewal and hope. “I paint how it feels to be connected to everything in my life, both present and past,” she said.
The exhibition Celebration opened on Aug. 9 and continues until Aug. 31. For more information, check out the artists’ websites, melaniefogell.com and franklevineart.com.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Carly Belzberg’s solo show is at Zack Gallery until Aug. 3. (photo by Nathan Garfinkel)
Carly Belzberg is a Zen practitioner, and her art reflects her beliefs. Her solo show at the Zack Gallery – The Spirit of Cloud, The Spirit of River – is all about change.
“I’m frequently at the Zen Centre of Vancouver,” she said in an interview with the Independent. “I study there and I realize that everything in life is in flux. A river is always changing. Water is quiet one moment, turbulent the next. It could be playful or angry, rushing or swirling, transforming from moment to moment. There are bubbles and spray and flow. Nothing is ever constant. The same is true of clouds. You can’t say a cloud is fluffy. It’s only fluffy one moment. It’s dynamic, fluid. The same is true of humans. We change from one day to the next, under the influence of the world. That’s what I wanted to express in my paintings: the freedom of change, its boundlessness. Nothing stays ‘this way.’ Everything evolves. Everything grows, and the essence of change is clearest when watching the river or the clouds.”
Watching the river or the sky helps her meditate. “Nature comes into you,” she said. “You breathe it in, and then it comes out again.”
Part of what comes out for Belzberg is her art. Colours and lines coalesce and crisscross in her abstract images of movement and form. The paintings represent the essence of change, as she sees it.
“It is my first-ever solo show,” she said, although she has participated in several group shows at the Zack in the last few years. “My art is a joy, and I wanted to spread my joy. I’m really happy to share my vision, something I’ve been nurturing for so long.”
Her path to this exhibit was as complicated as a water drop. She grew up in Vancouver, then studied at Concordia University in Montreal, Drexel University in Philadelphia and, later, at Simon Fraser University. With a bachelor of fine arts and art education and a master’s in art psychotherapy, she started her working life in Baltimore as an art therapist.
“I painted as a school girl and loved it. Had an amazing art teacher. That’s why I decided to do a master’s in art therapy. Art helped me a lot when I was sick as a teenager, and I wanted to learn how to use art to help others.”
Her work in Baltimore was in crisis intervention and with elderly dementia patients. She loved both sides of her job.
“Art gives people in crisis a voice,” she said. “It soothes. It supplies cathartic relief. Art is much better than talk because it gives people distance from their trouble and their feelings. Art provides a safe outlet.”
She also explained about the people she worked with who had dementia: “Some of them lost their memories in words, but the images are still there and they come out in the … paintings, even if they don’t remember. They draw their memories.”
While she kept on painting all that time, her focus was on building her art therapy career. Like many hobbies, her painting became relegated to the sidelines of her life.
After awhile, she moved to Winnipeg and, a few years later, around 2007, returned to Vancouver.
“I didn’t do much art, and it made me unhappy,” she said. “I wasn’t connected to who I really am. I found the lack of liveliness inside. I needed art. It is something to look forward to in the morning.”
Unfortunately, between her work for the Vancouver School Board and her private therapy practice, she couldn’t seem to find a place for her own art. Then, about three years ago, things changed.
“There was a demo at Opus, the art supply shop on Hastings in downtown,” Belzberg recalled. “It was held by a wonderful Vancouver artist, Suzan Marczak. I went there and I loved it. There were some difficult people attending that demo, and Suzan dealt well with them. I was impressed, and we talked. Suddenly, I wanted to get back to my painting. I guess I needed a push in the right direction. I started studying with Suzan. She is a very talented teacher, demanding but generous.”
Since their first meeting, the two have become such good friends that Marczak helped Belzberg hang the paintings for her Zack show.
“Suzan reminded me how much I loved painting,” said Belzberg. “It happens sometimes – you forget parts of what you are, and then you remember, and you have this desire to create again.”
About the same time, Belzberg made a serious commitment to studying Zen. This also led her back to her artistic core.
And her work for the school board helped, too. “I offer art therapy classes for the children of Vancouver elementary schools. Young kids don’t have stereotypes, their minds are free,” she said. “They see everything with fresh eyes, and it meshes with the Zen philosophy. In Zen, you let go of your preconceived ideas, of stereotypes. Eternal change means there are no stereotypes.”
This approach is what led to the current exhibit. “This show was a spontaneous exploration of change, prompted by curiosity. I never knew what would happen when I started a piece. As one of my teachers said, painting without a final product in mind is akin to driving on a dark highway, where you only see a short distance ahead of you at a time. Each decision is based on moment-by-moment input, on what you see on your canvas right now.”
Despite the prolonged period of partial withdrawal from the arts, Belzberg has had some sales and commissions over the years. One of her biggest commissions was the purchase of 14 paintings for a nursing home in Winnipeg. But she doesn’t paint for money.
“If I had to paint for money only, I think I’d get sick,” she said. “I want my paintings to go to people’s homes, make their space beautiful. You know, they say sometimes, ‘This house is so you.’ That’s how it is with me in my house. I like crystals and plants, they make me feel good, so I buy them for my home. If someone buys my paintings to make them feel good, to create an environment that resonates with their souls, that makes me happy.”
The Spirit of Cloud, The Spirit of River exhibit opened July 5 and continues until Aug. 3. For more information on Belzberg and her work, visit carlybelzberg.com.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
Diana Zoe Coop stands beside her painting “Frida Kahlo’s Garden.” (photo by Olga Livshin)
Diana Zoe Coop paints gardens. She paints them on canvas and paper. She paints them on costumes and wall panels. Her new show at the Zack Gallery, The Artist’s Garden, is an explosion of colours and shapes that sprout not only from nature, but from the garden of the artist’s imagination.
“All my life, I painted,” she said in an interview with the Jewish Independent. She studied for her bachelor of fine arts at the University of Manitoba, continued her education at Syracuse University in New York and finished her postgraduate specialty training at Saint Martin’s School of Art in London, England. She graduated with a degree in printmaking and thought herself more a graphic designer than a painter, but, as time passed, she gradually switched to painting.
“I didn’t always have access to a printer studio and equipment,” she explained. “Without it, I gravitated towards painting.”
Her favourite subjects are gardens and flowers. “People send me photos of beautiful gardens, the places they live or the places they travel,” she said. “These photos feed me ideas and often become paintings. My own travels also result in paintings.”
During her most recent trip to Mexico, in 2016, she visited Frida Kahlo’s home. Again.
“I’ve visited Frida’s home many times,” said Coop. “I always loved her art, felt an affinity for Kahlo’s work. She painted what she knew, even when she couldn’t move from her bed. I also paint what I know: my garden or the forest behind my house. Someone sent me a photo of a fiord, and I painted it…. Many of my paintings have a distinct blue colour. It is the colour of Frida’s house. She had walls painted with it, and this particular blue bleeds into my paintings.”
Coop’s paintings explore far beyond blue. In the gallery, her pieces are an explosion of hues and forms, bright arabesques of brushwork interspaced with dazzling sprinklings of gold and silver. The collective work is the representation of a garden through the lens of the artist’s perception.
“Recently, I read an interesting quote that I felt really defined the creative process,” said Coop. “It was written by Gordon Atkins, the renowned Canadian architect. He said something like this: ‘I don’t think we create. I think we interpret and I think our interpretations are the result of all the visual and actual experiences we go through.’ This seems to me to be an accurate definition of what happens when we paint or draw or sculpt. We are the storytellers of our generation. We make real and tangible our thoughts and emotions, our visceral interactions with the landscape around us.”
Many of the images in the show are mixed media collages, with pansies applied to the paint and bright crystals bringing sparkle to the compositions. “I grow pansies in my garden. It’s not easy to care for them, especially through the winters, and I do need many of them for my paintings,” Coop said.
Coop also uses art to convey her memories of “the myriad experiences of decades of relationships. And, most sadly, the profound losses of people I loved,” she said. “There were friends who passed away before their time, far too early and far too young.
“Roberta Mickelson inspired me to paint the wild gardens of my discontent and my anger, an anger directed at the unfairness of her life cut short. She was a talented artist herself, and it pained me to think that she could not paint anymore.
“And my friend Shelley Dyer, who passed, tragically, a year ago, was a beacon of brightness, beauty and creativity. Shelley loved the garden and all creatures great and small. Her laughter still echoes in my mind, and these paintings bear witness to the questions I asked myself every day, as I struggled to comprehend where she was now. One day, it just came to me: she was right here with me, in my paintings.”
Coop’s works hang in private and corporate collections in Canada, the United States, the United Kingdom, the Netherlands, Italy, Australia, Bulgaria, Poland, Czech Republic, Austria, Serbia, France and Finland. But painting pictures is only part of her creative journey. She also designs unique costumes for rhythmic gymnastics, dance, circus, aerial and skating. For years, many Canadian athletes wore her designs at international competitions, including at the Olympic Games.
“A girl gymnast once saw my paintings and said naively that they looked like her costume. I didn’t have the heart to tell her it was the other way around,” Coop said with a smile.
Her costume design business started as a personal necessity. “My daughters were gymnasts when they were young. I made costumes for them. Their friends on the team saw the costumes, liked them and asked me to help them with their costumes. And the word spread.”
In addition to making costumes, Coop volunteers as a judge of rhythmic gymnastics. “I studied for it, took an exam. Since 1997,” she said, “when I became an internationally qualified judge, I’ve traveled all over the world to judge the competitions.”
But art remains her passion and her joy. “I can’t stand when I don’t paint,” she confessed. “I become very cranky. Painting for me is as much a physical release as an emotional one. I need it. I don’t like being still. That’s why I enjoy working in my garden when I don’t paint. And I dance. I dance salsa and zumba, with their lively music, but I paint in silence.”
Coop sees her paintings as a reminder to the ones who come after her. “As we grow older, we hope to leave a part of ourselves behind,” she said. “Through our interactions, our deeds, our love of family and friends, and the people we meet, even briefly, we all attempt to be remembered. I consider making art the definitive memory-maker. Centuries after I depart from this visceral world, my art will still be a testament that I was here now.”
The Artist’s Garden exhibit continues to June 29. To learn more, visit the artist’s website, dianazoecoopartist.com, and her costume design site, zoeycouture.com.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
The current exhibit at the Zack Gallery – the Festival Ha’Rikud group show, called Israeli Music through the Years – is a fundraiser. Every painting on display has a silent auction sheet beside it, and people can bid on the pieces they like. The bidding closes on June 1, with all the proceeds going to the gallery.
Opening night on May 15 was a festive affair. Almost all of the 60 participating artists came to mingle and cheer one another on.
“The gallery offered all the artists boards of a universal size to paint on,” explained gallery director Linda Lando. “I sent the boards to the artists about three months ago to give them plenty of time. Every painting in the show is the exact same size, while the selection of the artists is eclectic. Some are professional artists I’ve had on my radar for years. Others are JCC members or their friends who learned about the show and applied. One entire wall of the show is dedicated to paintings created by Louis Brier’s residents attending art lessons. For many, it is their first show. Some never even painted before. It’s very brave of them to put their art out for everyone to see and judge.”
The paintings are as different as the artists themselves, although the theme is the same: music in one guise or another. Some artists lean towards Jewish mythology, like Penelope Harris’s mixed media “Miriam and her Sisters.” Three women dance in the painting, all wearing timeless clothing in soft colours.
Dancing seems to be a popular subject. In the artist Givon’s painting “Rikud,” four stylized women dance, their colours and shapes flowing into one another, while “Babushka,” by Carl Rothschild, dances alone, exuding humour and sharp lines; her balalaika leans on a wall beside the dancer, adding a Russian flavour to the painting.
Nini Rostoker-Shipman’s “Let’s Dance” is all about shoes. In the subdued brownish image, a couple dozen pairs of worn shoes – sandals, slippers and flats – lie docilely side by side, like a collection. Only one pair of shoes stands out. These are high-heels with sparkly buckles – real shoes glued to the image. Perhaps some fashionable woman from the artist’s family danced in those shoes long ago? The shoes look impertinent enough to enjoy dancing.
Other works explore music’s players, the musicians, as well as musical notations or instruments. In this stream, Maggie Farrar’s portrait of Leonard Cohen attracts attention. The showman’s ubiquitous hat sits rakishly on his head, and the names of his famous songs scroll across the canvas.
Below the portrait of Cohen hangs a piece by Wing Yee Wong called “Legacy.” The painting is popular with the auction bidders. It depicts an Abyssinian cat with its disproportionately big ears and haughty eyes, one yellow, another green. The cat is clutching a guitar and staring at viewers with contempt. There is an inscription on the guitar handle, demanding, “Feed me.” It’s hard not to smile while looking at it.
Musical instruments are also featured in “Where are the Ladies?” by Marion Eisman. In the mischievous painting, an all-male klezmer ensemble jams a merry tune on a shtetl street.
Another orchestra, in a piece by Alan Woolf using a pastel palette, is much more serious. These musicians perform a classical concert in the ruins of an ancient amphitheatre. The musicians’ tiny, delicate figures look like pencil sketches on the background of an azure Israeli sky.
In contrast, Iza Radinsky’s instruments play by themselves. No people populate her bold painting, just bright colours and ringing notes.
Bright colours also characterize Marlene Konyves’ “Sabras Rejoicing” – a bunch of gleeful blooming cacti – and Jocelyne Halle’s collage, which incorporates several of her Israeli photographs. “It is my first attempt at collage,” said the well-known photographer, who has exhibited her work at the Zack before.
And then there are abstracts. A rhapsody in green in Claire Cohen’s painting hints at melodic skeins and vague instrumental shapes. Sidi Schaffer’s “Eli, Eli,” with its butterflies flitting across the joyful blue ether, is infused with faint sadness – the title of the painting is the same as the song that inspired it.
“I love that song,” said Schaffer. “It is well known in Israel. It was written by Hannah Szenes, a Hungarian Jew. She immigrated to Palestine and became a paratrooper during the Second World War. She was killed by the Nazis when she was only 23, but her poetry is famous in Israel.”
It is impossible to mention all 60 artists who are participating in this show, but it can be said that all of the work on display demonstrates a love of art and music.
Olga Livshinis a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].
The exhibit Painting Intimate, showcasing the work of penny eisenberg and Ray Ophoff, is at the Zack Gallery until May 11. (photo by Olga Livshin)
The exhibit Painting Intimate introduces Vancouver art lovers to two very different local artists: penny eisenberg and Ray Ophoff. Different in their approaches, their styles and their creative philosophies.
“I have always liked painting,” eisenberg told the Independent. “I painted as a teenager, then stopped for a few years. I resumed painting in my 20s, but I was a closet painter then. I had several jobs in those years, worked as a cook and in retail. I kept on painting as a hobby, but, when I was 30, I took a class at Emily Carr. The instructor liked my works and suggested I apply for a full-time program.” She did.
Graduating from Emily Carr in 1995, she has been a full-time artist ever since, working in various themes and in a range of sizes as she tried to find her niche. For her, there is a huge gap between the words “picture” and “painting.”
“People buy pictures and hang them on their walls,” she said. “But I’m interested in paintings, not pictures. I’m trying to learn what is painting in the 21st century, when there are so many pictures around.”
Lately, as this exhibition demonstrates, all her paintings have been small. “I like working on small canvases,” she said. “I want to figure out what I want, and the small size allows me to create more paintings, to experiment with different series and subjects. Sometimes, I even work on a few different series simultaneously.”
The current show displays several of her series. There are hazy cityscapes, pulsing with light. There are brightly textured flower bouquets. A number of the paintings are from her latest series.
“In this series, I’ve been exploring the history of women in the arts, how other artists painted their female models,” she said. From 18th-century artist Jean-Baptiste-Simon Chardin to fashion photographers of the 20th and 21st centuries, eisenberg has transformed other artists’ women through the prism of her own artistic vision. In her abstracted compositions, which follow the others’ outlines but express her own esthetic, eisenberg had made all the portraits small and intimate – and faceless.
“There are two reasons for all my figures being faceless,” she said. “When we identify emotions, faces are what we look at. I wanted to show emotions without the faces, through paints, colours and shapes. In this series, I also examined who influenced whom in the art history, and how it reflected in their female model paintings.”
The internet age is another reason for this approach. “I view the reality of contemporary culture as a series of faceless interactions through social media,” she said. “That’s what I wanted to express. Hence, the hashtag in the title of the series, #otherartistswomen.”
When Zack Gallery director Linda Lando suggested eisenberg apply for a show, the artist embraced the opportunity. “I wanted a show at the Zack, but it is a large space,” said eisenberg. “I couldn’t handle the stress of filling it all by myself. I asked Linda if I could invite a friend artist, Ray Ophoff, to share it with me.”
Like Eisenberg, Ophoff is a long-time participant in the East Side Culture Crawl. In fact, that’s how they met.
“Many years ago, I visited her studio during the Culture Crawl,” recalled Ophoff. “I had a painting – a landscape – in my own studio at the time, and I saw that she had painted the same place, but it was much better than mine. We started talking and became friends.”
Ophoff has never studied art formally, or taken classes. He is a salesman by profession and paints in his spare time. “I’m entirely self-taught,” he said. “But I read a lot about art. My yearly spending for various art magazines runs to $900.”
Ophoff has 15 paintings in this show, most of them flowers and landscapes in exuberant, uplifting colours. Blown-up to 10 times or more of their real size, his flowers attract viewers with their deceptively simple beauty and their graceful allure. They would gladden any space, and people appreciate the optimism of his imagery.
“I sell almost everything I paint,” he said. “Mostly it is through the Culture Crawl or the First Saturday project. People come to my studio. I don’t even have a website.”
For Ophoff, his art is the only outlet where all the decisions are his alone. “I paint what I want,” he said. “When I walk through the woods or parks or gardens, I take photos. I always know: this is the image I want to paint. Not the entire photo, just a small fragment of it. My painting is not a tree or a flower. It is about that tree or that flower, my version of that tree.”
He considers himself an editor of imagery. “I edit everything unnecessary out of the image,” he explained. “When I find the perfect image, I always know. It is almost like time stops. I know: this will be a great one. Maybe not my painting of it, but the image itself.”
Ophoff’s canvases tell stories. They animate the flora around us and invite our imaginations to unfold. Despite their larger size, his works are, in their own way, as intimate as eisenberg’s much smaller compositions.
For both Ophoff and eisenberg, Painting Intimate is their first show at the Zack Gallery. The exhibit opened on April 11 and continues until May 11.
Olga Livshin is a Vancouver freelance writer. She can be reached at [email protected].